Read a quote from Lovecraft the other day and it inspired this strip:
My Little Disaster has been pre-occupied with this game of late...
My 2000 Kia Sportage turned over 100,000 miles on my way home from work today. It might not have been the best idea to take a camera phone photo at 60 mile per hour on Interstate 225, but that was when the moment occurred:
It's amazing how giddy you get when all those nines roll away to reveal that one followed by all those zeroes.
More on the Kia and some of my other cars HERE.
Cars
Here are a couple of really cool 'Green' sports cars.
Check out the all electric Tesla Roadster, write a check for $50K and reserve yours now.
FuelVapor Technologies describes their 3 wheeled “alé” thusly:
The car’s key innovation's are the fuel vapor system and it's light weight aerodynamic body. This fuel vapor technology (which is in the patent pending process) allows the engine to run on “fuel vapors” rather than liquid fuel. The majority of gas engines today run 14.7:1 – (14.7 parts air to 1 part gasoline). This proprietary fuel vapor system allows the “alé” to run on a ratio of over 20:1 without compromising performance. According to the textbooks, this ratio is impossible, as a standard engine would not start or run on a air/fuel ratio this low. With a 10 gallon gas tank found on most vehicles, the “alé” can travel from Vancouver BC to San Francisco CA on one tank. Over 15 hours of driving without filling up.
the system works by otherwise unprotected wizards attaching themselves to a powerful "patron" and becoming his "clients." The patron will smooth over any problems his client might have with the Ministry of Magic, and use his money and connections to help him out of his difficulties, and keep him out of Azkaban – as Dumbledore did with Mundungus Fletcher. In return, the client himself becomes a part of the patron's entourage and connections. The patron ends up with a large body of wizards dependent on him whom he can rely on (a private army, in other words) which effectively puts him above the law, because the wizarding world doesn't actually have armies, at least in the Muggle sense of the word. Some patrons may well have an even more powerful patron of their own, and a wizard at the top of a patronage tree is a very powerful figure indeed: such are Dumbledore, and Lucius Malfoy, to whom wizards like Crabbe and Goyle defer. Their sons in turn attend on Draco, as bodyguard and entourage; this makes them part of the same patronage network, because Draco's patron is his father.
So anyway in the fall of 1992, Mom convinced me that I should have a more fuel efficient and reliable car. So the Grand Prix was traded in on a 1990 Ford Tempo.
1990 Ford Tempo
I got this car somewhere around August/September of 1992. It was a 2 door, with light blue metallic paint. The cassette deck had auto reverse! Yeah! The Tempo was also the first manual transmission car I ever drove. I had to learn how to drive it pretty quickly and had a lot of help from my good friend Matthew and a girl named Nikki who would later break my heart on a trip taken in that very car.
I was driving this car when I got the only speeding ticket I've ever had. I got it the day after my 21st birthday. I was driving to Kansas City to see my girlfriend at the time, I had a wicked hangover and just wanted to get there as fast as I could. I was ticketed for doing 85 in a 60.
Another memory of this car is from spring of 1995. I was living in an apartment with my friend Kris, in Hays. I was still in college, and had been working at KBSH-TV as a master control operator since December. We got a nasty afternoon thunderstorm and the street by our apartment filled up like a river. I ended up with about 2 inches of standing water in the bottom of the car and got chewed out for being late for work. For about 4 months I had to leave the windows cracked or they'd fog up. It seemed like no matter what I did that damned carpet would not dry out. I even poured cat litter on the carpet to try to absorb the water out. It had a faint mildew scent for about a year afterward. I had this car from the fall of 1992 until late summer of 1996. My sister Traci had recently bought a 1993 Toyota Paseo and no longer wanted to deal with the payments. She got the Tempo outright and I took the Paseo and the payments that went with it.
1993 Toyota Paseo
My Paseo was the only car I ever owned that had a name. I think Matthew named every car he ever owned. There was 'Barry' the red Monte Carlo, named after the silver age Flash, and he once had a truck named 'Flattery', because 'Flattery' would get you nowhere. My friend Kris actually gave the Paseo the name 'the Blue Frog' because that's what he thought it looked like when he first saw it.
This car was also a manual, had a moon roof, and was the first car I had that had a factory CD Player. The CD player would become prone to skipping in later years and had to be replaced. One of the rear speakers would only work intermittently.
In March of 1999 I packed up this car with as much stuff as would fit (including Matthew) and drove out to Denver for a new job.
I had this car when I met my wife, Sara. She drove a green Geo Metro. We took this car on a white knuckle drive to Glenwood Springs, Colorado during a pretty wicked snowstorm. I think she had to literally peel my hands off the steering wheel. Right after we got married in October of 2000, we sold the Geo, and bought a brand new Kia Sportage. We were actually in the Paseo when I first told Sara I loved her and when we decided to get married. Sara drove this car a lot after we got the Kia, but when Sara got pregnant with our daughter, she eventually got too big to get out of the car because it rode really low to the ground. With no back seat to speak of our daughter never rode in this car. We had the Paseo until 2004 when we used it as a trade-in on Sara's dream car, a Subaru Outback. The Blue Frog was a great car. It got really great mileage and was very reliable for many years. It broke my heart a little to part with it, and I just realized while writing this how many great memories of that car I share with Sara.
2000 Kia Sportage
As I mentioned above, I got the Kia with my beautiful new wife in November of 2000. We bought this brand new which was a first for me. This is the car I still drive. It is exactly like the one pictured. We bought this because we wanted a vehicle with four wheel drive and we wanted to start a family, but a minivan was simply out of the question. While I did drive a Ford Tempo for a while, even I have my limits.
This was our family car up until Sara got her Outback, which is much better suited to the task. We've been to and from Utah and Kansas many times in this. We drove to Estes Park in this car when we stayed at the Stanley Hotel. And we took it on a very fun trip to Cedar City Utah.
Our daughter, born in '03 pretty much owns the back seat of the Kia now. I have lots of good memories of her sitting in her car seat and singing songs she learns at daycare or from CDs. Gillian does a pretty good version of 'Fish On' by Primus.
I got rear ended in this car one day after leaving work, and while it was in the shop I was forced to drive a Chevy Cavalier. I was never so glad to have my Kia as the day I got it back, and got to give the Cavalier back to the rental place.
I drive the Kia to work on my days in my carpool and it has been a very reliable vehicle. It's finally paid for and I intend to keep it until the day it dies.
Those are my Cars.
Last night, at work, a discussion came up about the cars we used to drive. Some people had literally a dozen or more cars since they'd been driving. This got me to thinking about how few cars I've had since learning to drive in 1987. I had to Google up pictures of all of these cars as, remarkably, I don't have any pictures of any of actual cars I drove.
These are the cars of my life:
1980 Ford Futura/1977 Mercury Monarch
I never owned either of these cars, but I learned to drive in a Ford Futura exactly like the one in the picture complete with scarlet red interior. My dad would take me out on the highway and let me drive around town as I prepared to take Drivers Ed.
The Futura was the family car for a few years and the Monarch belonged to my mother for driving to and from work. The power steering on the Monarch would go out if you turned a corner too hard and we eventually stopped fixing it. Our Monarch was oxidized silver with giant rust spots and a tattered and peeling maroon vinyl top. Mom eventually replace the Monarch with a 1973 Montego. I don't know what happened to the Futura. I think my sister Traci drove it for a while.
I drove these cars from fall 1987 to the sometime in 1988.
1973 Mercury Montego
The Montego was my first 'proper' car. The one that was mine to drive and I didn't have to share with anyone. I was basically given this car when Mom finally got the Buick Regal she'd wanted for years. My Montego was the 4 door version, with metallic sky blue paint, blue vinyl interior and a kick-ass white vinyl top. The trunk held a respectable amount of beer. I always loved the tail lights in the bumper on this car.
I drove it 120 MPH once with a good tail wind and going down hill. I made it from McCook, Nebraska to Oberlin, Kansas (my hometown) in a little over 15 minutes. The Montego would seat seven high school students comfortably and nine not so comfortably. It had an AM radio so I'd drive around Oberlin and listen to oldies on KOMA out of Oklahoma City. I had a lot of fun in this car with my buddies Jeff, Rhino, and Kris and Ken.
I drove this car much of my freshman year and all of my sophomore year of high school from summer 1988 to summer 1989 when I bought my '84 Pontiac Grand Prix.
1984 Pontiac Grand Prix
I loved this car, and the one in the picture above is almost the same color as the one I had which is actually kind of weird. Mine had better rims though. I bought it the summer before my junior year of high school from Michael Hanson. He'd fixed it up and given it a custom paint job. He'd gotten the paint from leftovers at a body shop and just mixed stuff up til he got a color he liked. The main body was about the color of the car in the pic and then there a wide darker strip on the top of the side panels and doors.
When this car got hit and the drivers side door got smashed I panicked that the body shop wouldn't be able to match the paint. As it turned out there was a little bit left over of the custom colors that Michael had made and there was enough to fix the door with out having to attempt a match.
I blew the engine in this car coming home from Boys' State in Lawrence Kansas, in the summer of 1990 and a rebuilt engine was put in at considerable expense. Thanks Mom! Tons of great memories in this car chasing girls and driving around with my buddies listening to the awesome cassette deck. I had this car when I got my first girlfriend. I drove this car from the summer of '89 until fall of 1992. One of my last memories of this car was loading it with all my clothes, my stereo, and a mini-refrigerator that I got as a graduation gift, and driving off to college. I went in a convoy with my friend Kenyon(in his Oldsmobile Toronado) and a girl from our class name Jill(she drove some white or silver little compact thing, I don't recall exactly what). A year after that Mom thought I needed a more reliable car, because I was in college and driving between Oberlin and Hays, Kansas with some frequency. It was ultimately traded in for my nerdy, practical, fuel efficient 1990 Ford Tempo.
More on that tomorrow in part 2.
